“Playboy mansion? More like a squalid prison: Former Playmates tell of ‘grubby’ world inside Hugh Hefner’s empire”

Today’s Daily Mail reports on life at the Playboy mansion of Hugh Hefner:

Hefner likes to have anywhere between three and 15 girlfriends at any one time. One of the group will be chosen to be Girlfriend No 1. She will share Hefner’s bedroom at all times, while the others are merely visitors…

‘Every Friday morning we had to go to Hef’s room, wait while he picked up all the dog poo off the carpet — and then ask for our allowance: a thousand dollars counted out in crisp hundred-dollar bills from a safe in one of his bookcases,’ [says Izabella St James].

‘We all hated this process. Hef would always use the occasion to bring up anything he wasn’t happy about in the relationship. Most of the complaints were about the lack of harmony among the girlfriends — or your lack of sexual participation in the “parties” he held in his bedroom.

‘If we’d been out of town for any reason and missed one of the official “going out” nights [When Hefner liked to parade his girls at nightclubs] he wouldn’t want to give us the allowance. He used it as a weapon.’

The allowance was also withdrawn if there was any infringement of the strict rules imposed by Hefner on all his girlfriends…

The girls travelled with Hefner in a white limousine which had a ­leopard-skin interior, with Playboy bunny logos sewn onto the seats. As they left the mansion, they drank Dom Perignon champagne and downed Quaaludes, a prescription-only sedative drug popularised in the Seventies and now handed out by Hefner…

According to [Jill Ann] Spaulding there were 12 girls there on that first night, and only she and another girl declined the offer to have sex with Hefner, who did not use a condom.

‘There was no protection and no testing for sexually transmitted ­diseases,’ she says…

Writing in Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality (1998, p.9-35), Ann Russo strives to reconcile dreams of individual liberty with the realities of social and economic inequality… “Micki Garcia, former director of Playmate Promotions, was for six years a supervisor, friend, and confidante to the ‘Playmates’. She ‘saw and felt the grim realities of the Playboy lifestyle: alienation from family and friends, drug abuse, attempted suicide, prostitution, unnecessary cosmetic surgery, mental and physical abuse, rape, attempted murder and murder…'”

Female Chavinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture
The most valuable feature of this book is the chapter “The Future That Never Happened,” Levy’s brief history of the feminist movement, which shows how it became co-opted by a male-dominated sexual revolution that evolved into raunch culture. For instance, one little-known fact is that Hugh Hefner helped bankroll early feminist initiatives such as the legalization of abortion and the Pill, the National Organization for Women, and the Equal Rights Amendment. Anything that broke down “prudish” sexual mores was good for business, Hef reasoned. His targets included not only religious conservatives but what he called the “puritan, prohibitionist…antisexual” element within feminism…

Pornographers invariably see feminists as their enemies. For example, this is what Playboy owner Hugh Hefner has been quoted as saying to his staff: “These chicks are our natural enemy… It is time we do battle with them… What I want is a devastating piece that takes the militant feminists apart.”
[File 1, p.x, and DianaRussell.com]

1990: Smith Students Mobilize Against Playboy
Women at the rally last night decried the magazine’s continuing effort to reduce women as “silly, naked, mutant mannequins,” said Simon. The magazine’s push to encourage campus women to pose naked is “another attempt to dehumanize us, demoralize us,” she said, noting the difficulty that women have in finding respect…

Applause was plentiful for the speakers at the rally, as was hissing at the mention of the names of Hugh Hefner, Playboy founder; Christine Hefner, his daughter, an executive at Playboy; Bob Guccione, the Penthouse magazine publisher, and Larry Flynt, who publishes Hustler…

Playboy TV operates several porn-channels in the UK. Below are some of the film- and programme-titles that have been on offer recently.

Playboy Enterprises, when advertising pornography…often use words like ‘bitch’, ‘slut’ and ‘whore’ about women. It is also not unusual for Playboy to use language that implies coercion and/or violence against women in their programming descriptions. Perhaps Playboy’s marketing department decided that insulting and degrading women would attract more paying customers. Perhaps they are trying to tell us something about the product they are promoting and selling.

…if you as a dancer break the regulations then you were fined : £20 for being late onto the floor, £20 for wearing the wrong shoes. £20 for the wrong or dress, £20 for missing your pole dance. These regulations, unlike the licensing regulations regarding touching for instance, were enforced strictly.

You weren’t allowed to leave early, you got fined if you don’t turn up at all. It becomes very easy to start losing money…

Getting drunk was considered by many to be the aim of the night as well as making money. If you had managed to get drunk on other people’s money then you had done well.

I used drugs with at least four or five of my colleagues while I was there, bought drugs off another, and was pretty regularly given drugs to use by male customers. I’m talking about cocaine in the most part, though sometimes we sneaked off upstairs to smoke a spliff if the night was slow.

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